I wallowed in that moment for a minute before rallying myself to reply: “We are so sad.”

We are indeed very sad but happy with it.

I defy all the brave, valiant joggers, dieters, dryathlon-ers to persuade me that four nights of back-to-back quality (yes, you may pronounce that with a comedy accent) drama which involves sitting on the sofa with a glass of wine while you’re in your ‘cwtchies’ isn’t the most beneficial thing for you.

If it’s well-acted, brilliantly-written and gives your brain a tiny, end-of-day massage, then nothing in the world is more therapeutic.

Don’t we need to be kind to ourselves? Can’t we be forgiven for indulging in the urge to hunker down?

The appalling shootings of journalists from the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo along with police in Paris this week have reminded us, painfully, of how this world can be a desperately cruel and unfeeling place.

How cowardly. How inhumane. How disgusting.

In Paris, spontaneous rallies took place, when people carried placards reading #JeSuisCharlie - I am Charlie - to show their defiance amid the horror. The National Union of Journalists in the UK organised one minute’s silence and #JeSuisCharlie trended on the micro-blogging site Twitter which was flooded with messages of support and cartoons which attacked the murders.

The most powerful one I saw was one headlined Yesterday above a picture of a sharpened pencil. Next was the headline Today which showed the same pencil snapped in half. The final headline read Tomorrow. In this image, the one pencil which had been snapped in half had been sharpened so that there were instead two pencils.

The pen (pencil/keyboard/cartoonist’s sketchpad) is mightier than the sword, we know that, but can any religion, any person, be quite so thin-skinned that taking offence means taking up arms?

I thought the ridiculousness of this was best summed up by the person whose Twitter handle is @TheTweetOfGod. The tweets are almost cartoonish in their tongue-in-cheek, wry observations of life from an Almighty’s point of view.

The day after the Parish shootings, the tweet was ‘Today, in the spirit of #JeSuisCharlie, insult the hell out of Me’.

It made me smile on a day when it was difficult to smile. It brought some light relief after a morning when I’d reassured my seven-year-old son that really, honestly, it was very unlikely that anyone would come and shoot me. Yes, I am a journalist. Yes, journalists had been shot. But... But...

Much of the debate I’ve heard too about freedom of speech has been depressing.

Freedom of speech? Of course is the choral reply. But within reason is the worrying caveat. It’s worrying because I don’t think people realise that freedom has to mean freedom.

Freedom means the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants. It also means the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.

If you start qualifying the idea of freedom then it’s not freedom. You aren’t free to criticise the most powerful; you aren’t able to hold leaders to account; you aren’t a free citizen.

People have to be free, in simple terms, to be offensive. It is up to us to be offended by it, or ignore it, or argue powerfully against it.

You don’t have to be able to justify your vulgar or profane views, you just know that you’re able to say them, out loud.

In the UK, we’ve been able to boast that free speech has ‘always’ been recognised as a common law right. Added to that is the European Convention on Human Rights; Article 10 of this was adopted into UK law by the Human Rights Act of 1998.

So far, so black and white. Where things go a little grey is in Article 10 where it goes further than allowing us a right of free speech it also guarantees ‘freedom of expression’.

It’s on the freedom of expression line where the law steps in, gingerly, and tries to pick a path between allowing us to keep the privilege of freedom of expression while accepting that the mis-use of this could harm society; speech that incites violence, for example.

The other area where the law intervenes and which I’m most familiar with is avoiding publishing anything defamatory. We, and in fact everyone, don’t have the right to publish defamatory statements that injure others’ reputations. There is a defence for this of course, and that’s justification. In other words... if it’s true.

Journalists often publish stories which people wish we wouldn’t; whether this is exposing a parliamentary cock-up that leaves the authorities red-faced or a court case that someone had hoped would go unnoticed.

The number of calls we’ve taken from people who tell us that their court conviction ‘isn’t a story’; or even that what we’ve uncovered isn’t a story is staggering. It’s like calling up a plumber to say, “you know that pipe you fitted there, I don’t think that’s really a pipe”.

Journalists get things wrong, of course, and we act quickly as we can to put things right but we’re allowed to point out the wonderful, the praiseworthy, the unfair and the unusual. We don’t take things down from our website just because it’s an old story. The internet today allows the past to hover, a click away, from the present, but that’s how the world is right now. We had the right to report what had happened and if it was a fair account, if it’s not wrong, then it remains.

Freedom of speech, freedom of expression; these are banners to rally behind. We all need to be #JeSuisCharlie.

Take your comfort, therefore, where you can and when you need it.

I’ve since received this text.

“Weds I have football. We’ll have to watch it when I get back at 10.30.”

I replied, “Tuesdays... I have netball. So we’ll have to Sky-Plus it and watch it late.”